GWENT: ‘Trails to trials: unlocking the Chartist trials documents’

As part of the 2014 – 2017 ‘Cynefin’ Tithe Map project, six smaller projects overseen by local archive offices took place across Wales, each project taking an aspect of the tithe maps which appealed to and engaged their local community.

The period when the tithe maps were being drawn was a very exciting period in Welsh history, including the Chartist Protest, 1839. The trials of the leaders and protestors which followed produced a large number of documents which were already digitised before the start of the project. These images were placed online in order for volunteers to work on them.

‘Trails to Trials’ volunteers transcribed the trial documents and then geo-tagged them to the contemporary tithe maps. This means it is now possible to recognise the geographic location within the documents and to use them in modern geographic search interfaces in the future.

Chartism in Gwent Poster ©GwentArchives

Cynefin was created thanks to support from

  1. Cynefin

    2014–17
    A large Tithe map is hung from a magnetic wall, with a digital camera set up in front of it.

    More than 1,100 Welsh tithe maps were repaired and digitised for this project. Volunteers working online helped to transcribe around 27,000 entries in the accompanying tithe apportionment documents, linking them to the relevant field numbers on the maps.

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